Her Dark Dinosaur Form

Got my bike ride early this morning.  That’s a good thing as there’s a riotous thunder shower now underway.  Episodic there are flashes of sun light hitting the hard which sheets of rain are tearing through which is all lovely to view from the serenity of the inside of a home.  The birds don’t seem to mind but then how would I know.  It can’t be easy to do any of your normal bird things when rain like that is falling.  I’m sure the squirrel’s fur has emollients that shunt the water off its back, but staring down at him now, he can’t help but be sopping wet, cold and compromised.

 

The snapping turtles presumably have a different assessment of the rain fall.  I’ve been expecting, hoping to see the big mother snapping turtle I saw last year on the trail, emerge from her swampy ditch to drop her eggs in the rough sand of the trail side southward near Phillies Bridge Road.  Was it April I’d seen her last year?  Was it August?  I could thumb back through all my photos and consider but haven’t. 

 

Everything is more fresh and exciting in the early morning.  I got a rush of excitement beyond what you’d imagine when I saw her dark dinosaur form today, up in the distance.  She was facing the trail and I greeted her and road on by.  The turn was right up ahead and I’d have a closer look in just a moment on the ride back.  And so I was a bit startled when I didn’t see her form, just a few moments later, as I made my way back. I parked my bike and found her a few feet in from the trail, facing the other direction.  Motionless.  But clearly she’d moved and whereas last year she was stolid and fastened to one spot despite walkers and bikers and dogs, presumably sitting on her eggs, this time she wasn’t averse to moving around. 

And her shell was moist.  Her tail looked like something on a stegosaurus, and I tried as unobtrusively as I might to photo her with different filters and different angles.  Later I walked back to my bike and rode past her and once again, she had turned one-hundred-and-eighty degrees.  And I thought it would have been interesting to actually watch her move as she was otherwise so still.  All year long I worried about what befell her and her eggs when this patch became dry in the heat.  And now its pouring rain, which I presume unlike the squirrel, she enjoys. 

Wednesday, 05/26/21